291–300 of 350 posts
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European cheap airlines have shown these prices are indeed sustainable for the last 20 years now?
The way it works is that ticket price of 10 EUR only really covers the cost of printing the ticket :) Everything else costs extra, which means that if you, for example, want to take some luggage with you, you would need to pay around 100-150 EUR
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Is every seat on every flight 10 EUR?
No, but you can check yourself. Flying in Europe is cheaper than train or bus. Not sure if there are Ryanair style cheap airlines in the US or other parts of the world.
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And it’s been said that the mass requires to build a Dyson sphere around our sun would necessitate destroying all of the planets: not gonna happen.
The estimates I've seen suggest maybe just Mercury. Which is good, because Mercury is mostly metal, whereas e.g. Mars is mostly rock and thus not useful for this kind of work
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> The single most important assumption in this paper is that energy consumption will increase by 2% per year. […] How much energy will we consume in 1,000 years I keep posting this link here on HN but, once again, it seems very appropriate: > The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. https://dothemat…
That's not a great argument by the physicist, the economist definitely won that debate. The physics guy only seems to realize that though when he wakes up the next day and has calmed down a bit. Although the link is useful for the thermodynamic calculations, there are two major problems with the argument as presented: 1. Right up front the physicist arbitrarily bans space travel. The economist, being an agreeable man…
When you have a capped number of humans, and every last one of them is jacked into the Matrix and has everything they could possibly want - what is there left to grow? If the growth in "wealth" doesn't actually reflect an improvement in human experience, then it's a pointless term. Sure you can have two computers trade virtual tokens at an ever-increasing rate until you saturate the network cable, but calling it "wealth" is an exercise in semantic subterfuge.
It's like saying economic growth is unbounded because you can always print more money. Eventually it has to bottom out in something real.
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Is every seat on every flight 10 EUR?
No, but you can check yourself. Flying in Europe is cheaper than train or bus. Not sure if there are Ryanair style cheap airlines in the US or other parts of the world.
My guess is if flights priced in externalities they could not be cheaper than alternatives like trains. (Unless they're leaning on whales like first class to subsidize cheaper seats.)
I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies. Our global energy consumption in 2008 was estimated to be 474 exajoules. The total energy received by the earth from the sun during a year is about 5 mil…
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Right now, the minds that conceive of any practical way of a spacecraft reaching the speed of light says we need the energy of multiple suns to be able to even reach that speed, so who knows where humans are in 500 years…
Either some new physics is found enabling faster-than-light travel, which would break a good chunk of our current understanding of physics. So... doubtful (imho). Or the only thing achievable is travel at some fraction of the speed of light. Say, a few %. At which point the nearest stars are a few-centuries away (one way trip), making interstellar travel feasible at least in theory . But say, 99% or 99.99% of lightsp…
Then to send that equipment requires sub light speed - say 0.1C
Once the equipment is on the other planet, then sending information is 1C.
I think the assumption that we need to send humans to other planets is not true.
Once we figure out how to build better space faring beings that we can stream our consciousness at light speed, that seems more feasible for space travel.
Humans are squishy meat bags that need to eat multiple times a day, pee, poop, sleep, stable temperature and many other needs to survive.
There’s a reason why humans have only made it to moon which is about 400,000km but for all other planets only rovers have touched down.
I highly doubt Elon/SpaceX will have living humans on Mars in our lifetime, it’s much more likely they’ll have their Optimus robot or a descendant of it on mars receiving instructions from Earth.
Human intelligence and consciousness isn’t that special. Just an algorithm running on biological hardware.
I'm not sure the author realized this, but they're actually making a statement about how crazy exponential growth is. Not about the sustainability of tidal power. This becomes obvious once you look closer at what that 2% growth rate (as assumed in the post) implies. Our global energy consumption in 2008 was estimated to be 474 exajoules. The total energy received by the earth from the sun during a year is about 5 mil…
Suppose we put solar panels in space. Then we would be entirely unconstrained by the amount of energy received by the earth. Heat dissipation would also no longer affect earth. Given our current trajectory with regards to spaceflight, it seems plausible we will be doing large projects of that scale in space in say 300 years, enough time to meet such exponential growth targets.
Imagine the sphere of a civilization expanding in space at some speed, in all directions. The volume of this sphere would equal time cubed (t^3) times some constant.
Now suppose this civilization has a magical power source that allows them to keep growing power consumption exponentially. So power consumption would equal 2^t (where time unit = one doubling time, 35 years in the case of 2% growth) times some constant.
2^t will always overtake t^3 no matter the constants, so power density of the sphere trends to infinity, so the civilization will cook itself in waste heat.
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That's not a great argument by the physicist, the economist definitely won that debate. The physics guy only seems to realize that though when he wakes up the next day and has calmed down a bit. Although the link is useful for the thermodynamic calculations, there are two major problems with the argument as presented: 1. Right up front the physicist arbitrarily bans space travel. The economist, being an agreeable man…
If that's "wealth", then "wealth" is worthless. When you have a capped number of humans, and every last one of them is jacked into the Matrix and has everything they could possibly want - what is there left to grow? If the growth in "wealth" doesn't actually reflect an improvement in human experience, then it's a pointless term. Sure you can have two computers trade virtual tokens at an ever-increasing rate until you…
Wealth as used by economists just means all the goods and services that we provide to one another, sometimes with the addition of "services" like a clean environment. It's very broad and includes things like cultural wealth, and doesn't even have to involve selling something.
That's why printing money doesn't create economic growth and nobody claims otherwise. In fact in the debate they specifically agree to discount inflation to avoid it getting in the way.
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The Google hit China TFR 1.705 for 2023 is bogus (and 2023 isn't even over yet, which should have alerted you), it's single-sourced from macrotrends.net which is quoting an old (pre-pandemic) UN forecast; you can see from their graph their (forecasted) numbers for 2020-2 turned out totally wrong. Lots of other sites are quoting the Google and macrotrends as fact. So now the #1 Google hit on that is misinformation. (A…
Its now dropping even lower in 2023, long after the lockdowns have ended. Turns out the East Asian style of hyper-competitive child rearing has its downsides, namely the high costs dissuade parents from having children altogether. China faces every antinatal problem the west does, except far worse. 1. Extremely high housing prices making family formation expensive 2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (…